I am /really/ starting to get annoyed by any address beginning with "Ladies and Gentlemen". I talked about it with some people I know who are MCs and explained it to them... what's ridiculous is that one of them recently did some announcing for a workshop that was pertinent to transgender and transsexual citizens' problems and they began that workshop with "Ladies and Gentlemen" :/ They said they didn't find a "suitable alternative" and rebuked me with a "did you want us to be robots and say "hello humans!"" I suggested something neutral like "Good evening and welcome to..." but it got me wondering... is there something that is inclusive of transfolk as far as such introductions go?

Summer is miles and miles away, and no one would ask me to stay.And I, should contemplate this change... to ease the pain. And I, should step out of the rain... turn away.

"Ladies, Gentleman, and everyone in between" might be close, but would still probably rub people the wrong way (as a derivative from the original it would most likely be taken as a joke, especially if the audience was mostly cis). I'd think you'd have to be pretty creative. Maybe start off with "Good evening and welcome to..." or an equivalent, then break into an outline of the event and atmosphere, then conclude with something like "So where you're a she or a he or a ze or sie, I hope you all have a great time tonight". It might work at an LGBT club (if there was actually such a thing), but then the tone of this hypothetical intro seems kind of bouncy and light and probably wouldn't translate well to a great many contexts.

"The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves" - Albert Camus

As an occasional MC, I really don't see any point in including gender or sex in the standard greeting. A "Good evening everyone" or similar phrases work perfectly well, and you avoid the entire issue of alienating parts of your audience. If you really want to address what you're saying to a group rather than general, use something appropriate to the function of the event, like "Good evening members of [insert group specific name]".

It's one of these things where eliminating the issue in it's entirety is a great deal easier than correcting the problem with the standard procedure.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it - Aristotle

A White Russian, shades and a bathrobe, what more can you want from life?

Article on bigender- people who report their gender changing from time to time. I'd be interested in seeing how their hormone levels change over time, and how well that tracks their gender self-reports.

Vaniver wrote:Article on bigender- people who report their gender changing from time to time. I'd be interested in seeing how their hormone levels change over time, and how well that tracks their gender self-reports.

This is a potentially dangerous reduction, as it stands the risk of providing a prima facie rationalization for testosterone therapy for transwomen, and other equally horrible things. It also seems to simplify things unnecessarily since we already know the human brain is sexually dimorphic along a number of different and separate axes, and we also know that the brain is hardly fully understood. Curiosity is grand, but um... gosh. I'm trying to think of a non-horrible way to say it. Try to channel your sense of wonder down new and productive rather than well-troden and refuted paths?

Sorry. Certain memes literally hurt to hear and that extends to hypotheses. "Being gay is genetic" is also something that hurts my ears (despite being potentially true; I just hate how it seems to be taken as one of two possibilities and how it obfuscates the complexity of biology), as is "gender is a construct" (SORT OF PARTLY but just as much a frantic outburst of soft scientists and hipsters trying to seem relevant). These memes hurt my ears in the same way as political slogans tend to.

Vaniver wrote:Article on bigender- people who report their gender changing from time to time. I'd be interested in seeing how their hormone levels change over time, and how well that tracks their gender self-reports.

joshz wrote:So I just found out that someone who I thought was a decent, intelligent person thinks that choosing to act on homosexual urges is a sin, and possibly also that homosexuality is a choice. :/

:/

Vaniver wrote:Harvard is a hedge fund that runs the most prestigious dating agency in the world, and incidentally employs famous scientists to do research.

afuzzyduck wrote:ITS MEANT TO BE FLUTTERSHY BUT I JUST SEE AAERIELE! CURSE YOU FORA!

joshz wrote:So I just found out that someone who I thought was a decent, intelligent person thinks that choosing to act on homosexual urges is a sin, and possibly also that homosexuality is a choice. :/

Decency and intelligence are the aggregation of decisions and opinions. Those opinions may change, especially if you nudge them.

Brace wrote:This is a potentially dangerous reduction, as it stands the risk of providing a prima facie rationalization for testosterone therapy for transwomen, and other equally horrible things. It also seems to simplify things unnecessarily since we already know the human brain is sexually dimorphic along a number of different a separate axes, and we also know that the brain is hardly fully understood. Curiosity is grand, but um... gosh. I'm trying to think of a non-horrible way to say it. Try to channel your sense of wonder down new and productive rather than well-troden and refuted paths?

Spoilering long response:

Spoiler:

Agreed that the brain is sexually dimorphic in a lot of ways. Most of those ways are static, though; the sizes of Wernicke's and Broca's areas don't change from day to day. So for gender self-reports to be changing from day to day, there has to be something going on that can vary on those timescales.

Suppose that the self-reports don't track hormone levels (or their derivative or so on). That suggests that gender self-report is stored somewhere other than hormones, and examining the differences between bigender and transgender and cisgender individuals may find it. (It also seems like more evidence against testosterone therapy for transwomen.)

Suppose that the self-reports do track hormone levels (or their derivative or so on). That suggests that gender self-report is linked to hormones, but probably something else as well. Comparing the variance of bigender hormone levels to cisgender and transgender hormone levels will give some clues- do they just have much larger variance? Do they have similar variance but respond to it differently? It may be that bigender individuals have no anchor for their gender, and so their self-report fluctuates with normal hormonal variation. That missing anchor might show up as a brain region difference or a brain chemistry difference.

I am interested in learning what is true, even if there are risks involved.

joshz wrote:So I just found out that someone who I thought was a decent, intelligent person thinks that choosing to act on homosexual urges is a sin, and possibly also that homosexuality is a choice. :/

Decency and intelligence are the aggregation of decisions and opinions. Those opinions may change, especially if you nudge them.

That is true, and I'm planning on having a discussion with him about it at some point when I have time.

PerchloricAcid wrote:I've always wondered what male gender "role" would be analogous to the female gender "role" of using nail polish (or, for that matter, wearing skirts, using make-up, wearing high-heels...) so that I could do it, just to raise awareness about how sucky it is that it's not considered to be okay for a "man" to have painted nails.I was thinking about cutting my hair short, but I'm not so sure it'd look good on me. Everything I thought of is already ''acceptable'' for women (e.g. wearing ties).

There isn't really one, through the wonders of misogyny at work.

Spoiler:

I'm incredibly late to the party on this one, but in my eyes this isn't misogyny at all, it's misandry. Women fought for their right to act masculine through feminism and without feminism, it would still be unacceptable. It's not acceptable for men to act feminine because men have never had a fight for their rights.

And corsets are incredible. I'm still deciding if I want to wait for my boobs to figure out what size they want to stop growing at or if I should just get one that doesn't cover boobs, or if I should make a wild guess, or something else before I get a corset

One friend* recommends getting it done at a (reputable/licensed) tattoo-n-piercing parlour, rather than ye random jewelry shoppe. I'm not sure why, but the thought of going to a jewelry store to get a piercing done made her shudder.

Now that that's out of the way; no it's not silly at all to go to a tattoo and piercing for lobes. That's what they're for. They will charge more than Ye Average Jewelery Shoppe but there's a reason for that. Places like Claire's are notorious for not training their piercers. They also use piercing guns which are less sanitary and often botch the piercing. Piercings are ideally done with a hollow needle, by hand. Always get hypoallergenic stainless steel studs for the initial piercing to avoid infection and allergies.

I'm speaking as a person who has had up to fifteen piercings in at a time and is pretty much an expert by now at getting bits of metal shoved into me.

Now that that's out of the way; no it's not silly at all to go to a tattoo and piercing for lobes. That's what they're for. They will charge more than Ye Average Jewelery Shoppe but there's a reason for that. Places like Claire's are notorious for not training their piercers. They also use piercing guns which are less sanitary and often botch the piercing. Piercings are ideally done with a hollow needle, by hand. Always get hypoallergenic stainless steel studs for the initial piercing to avoid infection and allergies.

I'm speaking as a person who has had up to fifteen piercings in at a time and is pretty much an expert by now at getting bits of metal shoved into me.

Yeah, that confirms what I've heard. I will be going to piercing place, then, when I decide to have them done. I only thought it would be silly because the one place I've been into before had tons of pictures of crazy piercings they're done. And pierced ears are so common, it didn't occur to me to go to a specialty place for them.

You've had fifteen piercings? That's amazing. What piercings did you have? My girlfriend has eleven and wants more, but doesn't know what else to pierce.

Your knowledge of scientific biological transmogrification is only outmatched by your zest for kung-fu treachery!

PerchloricAcid wrote:I've always wondered what male gender "role" would be analogous to the female gender "role" of using nail polish (or, for that matter, wearing skirts, using make-up, wearing high-heels...) so that I could do it, just to raise awareness about how sucky it is that it's not considered to be okay for a "man" to have painted nails.I was thinking about cutting my hair short, but I'm not so sure it'd look good on me. Everything I thought of is already ''acceptable'' for women (e.g. wearing ties).

There isn't really one, through the wonders of misogyny at work.

Spoiler:

I'm incredibly late to the party on this one, but in my eyes this isn't misogyny at all, it's misandry. Women fought for their right to act masculine through feminism and without feminism, it would still be unacceptable. It's not acceptable for men to act feminine because men have never had a fight for their rights.

Hmm, not quite.

Spoiler:

It's also misogyny, as misogyny is not only devaluing women, but also devaluing anything feminine (anything associated with femaleness/women).I used to think along your lines, that while sexism mostly is discrimination of women, it sometimes is also discrimination of men - of men who want to be preschool teachers, stay-at-home dads, want to wear make-up or skirts, carry handbags or show their emotions.I must say that reading Julia Serano's book "Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity" cleared that up for me.Women are devalued for being women and for being feminine (e.g. showing emotions = weak), men can also be devalued ... if they show feminine gender expression (examples above), but it's both the same sexism, the devaluing of women/femaleness and femininity.

Now that that's out of the way; no it's not silly at all to go to a tattoo and piercing for lobes. That's what they're for. They will charge more than Ye Average Jewelery Shoppe but there's a reason for that. Places like Claire's are notorious for not training their piercers. They also use piercing guns which are less sanitary and often botch the piercing. Piercings are ideally done with a hollow needle, by hand. Always get hypoallergenic stainless steel studs for the initial piercing to avoid infection and allergies.

I'm speaking as a person who has had up to fifteen piercings in at a time and is pretty much an expert by now at getting bits of metal shoved into me.

Yeah, that confirms what I've heard. I will be going to piercing place, then, when I decide to have them done. I only thought it would be silly because the one place I've been into before had tons of pictures of crazy piercings they're done. And pierced ears are so common, it didn't occur to me to go to a specialty place for them.

You've had fifteen piercings? That's amazing. What piercings did you have? My girlfriend has eleven and wants more, but doesn't know what else to pierce.

Pretty much everyone starts with pierced ears then moves on to bigger, weirder things.

15 isn't a huge number actually by body mod standards, more like upper middle. The full list is three on each lobe (bottom ones stretched), three in right cartilage, industrial in left (that's the little bar that crosses the curve of the cartilage), tongue, both nipples and belly button. Most of them are out now but I'm hoping to get the industrial and nipples redone and maybe get something in the ladybits area. Really I think I prefer tattoos; they don't get caught in the hair of people you're making out with....

You can actually get industrial bars in a ton of shapes. I have really tiny ears (to match my tiny everything else) and regular bars have never works for any piercing. Letting my tongue heal was especially bullshit because they only had the regular healing bars at the shop I went to.

I've actually played with the idea of a corset piercing but the maintenance is too much for me to really deal with. I may get a downgraded version at like the back of my neck or something but I'd rather just get a really badass back tattoo and stop it already with all the piercing. I have to admit that the more intense/unusual piercings are dead sexy and I 'll probably always covet my ex's forearm piercings for their sheer awesomeness.